OOOOH! I saw this one! It was when Geordi and the Romulan were trapped on the planet surface, and Wesley sent them a beacon so they could signal the ship and beam back up! This is the same thing, right?

2001 was about the evolution of mankind from our current stage to the next. That's why the monolith appeared when we learned how to use tools and later when we learned how to leave the planet. The whole Hal thing was just a sub plot.

TennesseeBuck, Nuttercut, Max Load (cool name, btw), et al: That's the beauty of Kubrickian films, they're about everything and nothing- he leaves/left it up to the audience to figure it out, rather than hammer you over the head with whatever "point" he was trying to make (unlike other Hollywood productions, like, say, Star Trek). 2001 was about all that and more, and it's up to the viewer to take whatever he wants from the film.

The Chandra observatory was named for the now dead Indian-American Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. If the X ray observatory is looking for it's namesake, it should be searching the swamps of Georgia.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've just lost the picture, but what we have seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over, "conquered" if you will, by a master race of giant space ants. It is unclear from this vantage point where the ants will eat the captive humans or merely inslave them; one thing is for sure, there is no stopping them, the ants will soon be here.

I was watching a Star Trek: The Next Generation rerun on TNN tonight. It's obvious this thing on Jupiter is a tachyon pulse. That has to be the most useful invention in the qhole Federation. You can use a tachyon pulse to do just about anything.

"Indeed, says Gladstone, Jupiter has "Northern Lights" just as Earth does -- only on a different scale. Jupiter's auroras are hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than our planet's. Furthermore, the glowing rings around Jupiter's magnetic poles are twice the diameter of Earth itself!"

Do ya see it? An exclamation mark.

"And indeed it did. But the new image was a surprise. Chandra revealed that most of the x-rays came from a hot spot located very close to Jupiter's north magnetic pole -- not from the auroral ring itself. Furthermore, it pulsed!"And another!

Respectable scientific papers simply do not include exlcamation points.

Now if it were coming from MARS, I'd worry... a huge jet of luminous gas, with a green mist trailing behind it...

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